Finance & Business Operations Topics
Financial management, budgeting, ROI analysis, and business operations. Covers financial forecasting, valuation, and operational metrics.
Resource Allocation and Budget Management
Core principles and practices for allocating finite resources including budget, headcount, time, equipment, and technology to maximize impact. Covers prioritization frameworks, cost benefit thinking, build versus buy trade offs, budget optimization, scaling budgets across teams and projects, and basic capacity forecasting. Candidates should be able to explain how they decide where to invest, how to balance short term needs versus long term strategic priorities, how to make transparent trade off decisions (speed versus cost, quality versus efficiency), and how to justify budget requests with simple quantitative reasoning and scenarios.
Budget and Cost Optimization
Practices for managing budgets and optimizing infrastructure and operational costs. Topics include right sizing and autoscaling strategies, workload placement and instance selection, reservation and committed use approaches, cost allocation and chargeback models across teams, forecasting and budgeting cycles, trade offs between capital and operating expenditures, preparing financial business cases for technical investment, measuring cost efficiency and total cost of ownership, and communicating cost versus feature trade offs to executives. Candidates should discuss actions to reduce waste in pipelines and services while maintaining reliability and performance.
Vendor and Partner Relationship Management
Comprehensive end to end management of external vendors, suppliers, agencies, freelancers, and strategic partners. Candidates should be able to discuss vendor landscape assessment and segmentation, selection criteria, request for proposal processes, and total cost of ownership analysis. The topic covers procurement and contracting skills including contract negotiation, governance models, pricing and terms negotiation, escalation clauses, and establishing service level agreements and performance metrics. It includes operational practices for onboarding and integrating external providers, communication and governance cadences, expectation setting, supplier development and capability improvement, and ongoing performance monitoring, reviews, and dispute resolution. Candidates should also be able to evaluate tradeoffs between insourcing and external partnerships, approaches to consolidation versus diversification, criteria and processes for deepening, replacing, or offboarding vendors, and collaborating with vendors to drive innovation and align vendor relationships to strategic business and technology objectives.
Business and Financial Acumen
This topic assesses the candidate ability to link commercial decisions to company financial outcomes and to use financial metrics to drive recommendations. Core skills include understanding and calculating return on investment, modeling revenue scenarios, assessing account profitability and customer lifetime value, and estimating payback periods. Candidates should be comfortable discussing pricing strategy, discounting approaches, contract economics, partnership revenue splits, and vendor negotiations. It also covers practical budget management skills such as allocating spend across headcount and programs, defending budget requests, and prioritizing investments based on financial impact. At a strategic level, candidates must demonstrate the ability to interpret business metrics to diagnose root causes of performance changes, evaluate trade offs between growth and profitability, and recommend actions that align operational choices with overall company strategy.